"I understand it," said Helen, gently. She looked wistfully at the cottage. "So changed--I have so often pictured it to myself--never, never like this; yet I loved it, commonplace as it was to my recollection; and the garret, and the tree in the carpenter's yard." She did not give these thoughts utterance. And they now entered the garden. CHAPTER IV. Mrs. Fairfield was a proud woman when she received Mrs. Riccabocca and Violante in her grand house; for a grand house to her was that cottage to which her boy Lenny had brought her home. Proud, indeed, ever was Widow Fairfield; but she thought then in her secret heart, that if ever she could receive in the drawing-room of that grand house the great Mrs. Hazeldean, who had so lectured her for refusing to live any longer in the humble tenement rented of the Squire, the cup of human bliss would be filled, and she could contentedly die of the pride of it. She did not much notice Helen--her attention was too absorbed by the ladies who renewed their old acquaintance with her, and she carried them all over the house, yea, into the very kitchen; and so, somehow or other, there was a short time when Helen and Leonard found themselves alone. It was in the study. Helen had unconsciously seated herself in Leonard's own chair, and she was gazing with anxious and wistful interest, on the scattered papers, looking so disorderly (though, in truth, in that disorder there was method, but method only known to the owner), and at the venerable, well-worn books, in all languages, lying on the floor, on the chairs--any where. I must confess that Helen's first tidy woman-like idea was a great desire to arrange the latter. "Poor Leonard," she thought to herself--"the rest of the house so neat, but no one to take care of his own room and of him!" As if he divined her thought, Leonard smiled, and said, "It would be a cruel kindness to the spider, if the gentlest hand in the world tried to set its cobweb to rights." _Helen._--"You were not quite so bad in the old days." _Leonard._--"Yet even then, you were obliged to take care of the money. I have more books now, and more money. My present housekeeper lets me take care of the books, but she is less indulgent as to the money." _Helen_, (archly.)--"Are you as absent as ever?" _Leonard._--"Much more so, I fear. The habit is incorrigible, Miss Digby--" _Helen._--"Not Miss Digby--sister, if you like." _Leonard_, (evading the word that implied so forbidden an affinity.)--"Helen, will you grant me a favor? Your eyes and your smile say 'yes.' Will you lay aside, for one minute, your shawl and bonnet? What! can you be surprised that I ask it? Can you not understand that I wish for one minute to think you are at home again under this roof?"